Synthesize multi-level composite filter for synthetic-aperture radar image identification

A novel optical correlator system to identify the Synthetic-Aperture Radar (SAR) image based on multilevel composite function (MCF) filters, constructed in input domain, is presented. The MCFs are synthesized by the simulated annealing algorithm, which are suitable to current spatial light modulators because of their limited dynamic range requirement of the MCFs. In this paper, we focus our investigation on the MCFs for the SAR image identification, including the impact of number of levels on discriminability and noise performance. In addition, a unique position encoding technique is also added in the optical system so that MCF can be implemented easily. The simulated and experimental results are presented, which are quite consistent.